We've looked previously at a number of ASRock AMD based integrated motherboards and today we have yet one more from the company who have been on a role lately. Today we'll be looking at another 780G based motherboard but this time one that mixes things up from their previous effort with the A780GXE/128MB.

Since AMD launched the 780G chipset earlier this year there's been some confusion about SidePort memory, what motherboards have it and what don't, what size, and how fast it is. This is fairly important as well at least when it came to integrated graphics as without it there is a major drop off in performance. The ASRock 780GXE contains 128MB of DDDR2 sideport memory on board which can run at 1066MHz. This should help quite a bit with gaming scores or if you don't want to use any of your system's memory then it'll resolve that as well. The other major feature of the 780GXE board is support for 140W TDP processors which helps if you find one of these around. AMD is starting to phase out the 140W 9950BE to 125W now but who knows when that might creep up again the future.

The board's layout is quite good for a budget and integrated motherboard. Not much should actually get in the way here. One problem that might occur is if you're using high-end RAM which extends 3-4" in the air and a very-highend heatsink it might be hard to place RAM in the closet slot. Other wise it shouldn't be an issue. Not much cooling is needed for the 55nm AMD chipsets so the few heatsinks are more than adequate.

I/O ports on the back consist of a PS2 mouse and keyboard port, VGA-Output, DVI-Output (ASRock also includes a handy DVI-to-HDMI adapter), six USB 2.0 ports, an E-SATA port, Firewire, 1 Gigabit Ethernet jack, and analog HD audio output. Isn't it great that motherboard companies finally started putting 6 USB 2.0 ports on the back? Long overdue and now even on boards under $100.

Onboard expansion there are headers for more USB and Firewire ports, a PCI-Express 1x slot, two PCI-Express 16x slots, and three PCI slots. As with all ASRock boards with SLI or Crossfire they still feature the older switch card to go between Crossfire and single card mode. We wonder the if the costs of adding this part to the motherboard is more than what it would be to feature a board that automatically detects it. For most people who it'll only matter once or twice in the motherboard's lifetime so it's not a big deal but still we hope the next-generation of ASRock motherboards move past that.

Standard accessories are included here including I/O shield, a few SATA cables, IDE cable, and more.